David Hare

Joe Murphy and Joe Robertson don’t yet have the brawn and brain of Sophie Treadwell or Shakespeare. Nor do they have the acumen of Wallace Shawn, a playwright unsurprised by Donald Trump. But in The Jungle, at the Young Vic, these activists told one of the most important stories of the century.

Why did the camp at Calais have to be destroyed? Why did the governments of Europe’s 750 million inhabitants react with such cruelty and hysteria to the idea of just a million refugees coming to the continent? Do the rich really believe, as matter of long-term policy, that they can live indefinitely in gated communities and keep the poor out? Are they never going to share? How can Theresa May call herself “Christian”? How can anyone still propagate free-market capitalism when they are so opposed to the free movement of people?

Murphy and Robertson have drawn the map for a standoff we know is going to be played out many times over. Whenever you next see the dispossessed abandoned by supposedly civilised governments, whenever you watch well-intentioned volunteers struggle with the problems of trying to help, you’ll say: “Oh, it’s just like TheJungle.” And with Stephen Daldry and Justin Martin directing, the play had welcome artistic significance too. The young audience leant forward, catching an exhilarating whiff of the glory days of British theatre before the cult of style threatened to take its soul away.

Poetic and human … Richard Armitage as John Proctor in The Crucible at the Old Vic, London, in 2014. Photograph: Tristram Kenton for the Guardian.

James Graham

The hysteria of the mob, the power of a lie, the fallibility of our institutions. These themes are resonant, but The Crucible also taught me that plays can often more effectively address the anxieties of the here and now by returning to the way back when.

Arthur Miller wasn’t the first to come up with this, of course: the Greeks did it; Shakespeare was always at it. In finding a historical equivalent to what was happening around him in the US, Miller’s play leaves the perfunctory plains of literalism behind and elevates itself to the heights of metaphor. In this way it protects itself from the pitfalls of political playwriting – ranting, bias, being too worthy or crusading. It allows us to see our own modern day troubles in context. As John Proctor tells us: “We are only what we always were.”

On the surface it’s not necessarily subtle. The McCarthy hearings in 1950s America were a political witch hunt. Miller went back to a time of hunting witches: Salem, 1690s; a nation trying to find itself. But its execution is poetic, truthful and human. These characters are not ciphers for Miller’s politics but people in pain making impossible decisions, agents in their own demise. Like any of us. Like the US, then and now.

James Graham’s plays include Quiz, which opens at the Noël Coward theatre, London, on 31 March.

Threat and despair … Beth Cooke and John Conroy in the English Touring Theatre and Rose Theatre Kingston co-production of Translations in 2014

Timberlake Wertenbaker

In an imaginary Guide to Successful Tyrannies, there would be a chapter showing that the best way to crush people is by taking away their language – with that, you eradicate their culture, memory and identity. When slaves were brought from Africa to the US, they lost their many and varied languages. Colonists have always imposed their own languages on the colonised.

Translations by Brian Friel is one of the few plays I know that deals with this. And Friel does it with anger and linguistic beauty. This has one of the most beautiful love scenes ever written (two people who try to communicate in separate languages), permeated by a sense of threat and despair.

The play takes place in 1833, in a “hedge school” in rural County Donegal. A captain and his lieutenant arrive to “map Ireland” and proceed to anglicise or simply rename all local places. What happens when your familiar places are changed and you no longer know where you are? When Bun na hAbhann becomes Burnfoot? Eradicate a language and people may find no other recourse but violence. In the Basque country, where I grew up, the same happened. All local geographical names were replaced by French or Spanish ones. A neighbourhood called Herburua was renamed, in that same amusing way as Burnfoot, Cherchebruit (“Search noise”).

I’m surprised Translations is not revived more often. In its subtle way, it is probably one of the most political plays of the last century.

Timberlake Wertenbaker’s plays include Our Country’s Good, which is at Nottingham Playhouse until 24 March and on a UK tour.

Anupama Chandrasekhar

Girish Karnad’s Tughlaq, the first Indian play I ever read, is a coruscating portrayal of a madman/genius who was the sultan of Delhi for 25 years in the 14th century. Historically, he was notorious for shifting the capital – and its entire population – from Delhi to Daulatabad and back again to Delhi. His name became a metaphor for a wavering mind and causing endless misery. Also remarkable during his regime was his decision to introduce copper coins instead of silver to regularise currency. In his chaotic sultanate, it elevated counterfeiting into a roaring cottage industry. This is the backdrop of Karnad’s sprawling Shakespearean study of political ambition and betrayal in a region imploding under Hindu-Muslim tensions and a despot’s whimsies.

Karnad’s Tughlaq is a well-read man of ideas burdened with a temper and a boyish desperation to win approval. The play has one of the most thrilling episodes in theatre: an assassination attempt during the Sultan’s prayer. No words. Just the muezzin’s prayer. Karnad wrote the play in Kannada in 1965 when India’s disillusionment with Nehru’s socialism and idealism was at its peak. It is often held up as an allegory for the failed Nehruvian dream. I first read it in the 1990s, during the early chaos surrounding the Babri mosque’s demolition and India’s economic liberalisation, and I found the sociopolitical roiling of the 14th century strangely resonant. I reread it again recently and found premonitions of Trump. It is one of those rare gems that is both of its time and ahead of it.

The horror of our times … Samantha Colley in Far Away at the Young Vic in 2014. Photograph: Tristram Kenton for the Guardian

Ella Hickson

Many plays walk you through modern political debate. You leave the theatre and spend the next weeks passing lines off as your own. But no matter how subversive the conversation, if the form is naturalistic, the argument dialectical and the protagonists – as the genre tends to have them – white, male and middle-aged, then the play is part of the establishment. Caryl Churchill’s Far Away is as mad as it is profound. It features a young girl witnessing her uncle loading a lorry with bloody children, a sequence of hat-making and a war in which the elements of nature turn against each other.

What happens to you as you experience the action is far larger than the sum of these parts. You are watching the unfurling of a huge metaphor for the horror of our times. The abstraction makes the viewer active; you draw your own conclusions, question everything, work hard to see what powers are at play beneath the fabric of the world. These are the faculties we should be applying to our current political moment. Far Away is not a play during which you listen, laugh and go home with soundbites: it teaches you to re-see. We must be aware of the world’s power structures if we stand any chance of changing them.

Ella Hickson’s plays include The Writer, which opens at the Almeida, London, on 14 April.

Jack Thorne

In 1992 I was starting to get interested in politics and I remember so clearly the headline: “It’s The Sun Wot Won It”. A newspaper claiming it controlled an entire election, and they were probably right. That headline stained me, but I wouldn’t have a clue how to write about it. James Graham’s Ink examines how that headline was written, or, rather how the paper behind it was made.

A play in two acts about the rebirth of the Sun under Rupert Murdoch, it’s written like a caper. In act one you fall in love – how can these characters destroy the dusty institutions around them? In act two you watch your lover make all the wrong decisions. The caper sours as people and events are increasingly abused.

The play tells the story not through Murdoch but through his editor Larry Lamb, a man who feels he’s never had his voice heard, a man distorted by the greed of competition and the allure of figures, and a man who does the twisting on his very own. In fact, as the caper turns, Murdoch extraordinarily almost becomes a moral voice.

The political plays I love are human and humane portraits rather than polemics, and what sets Ink apart is it manages to humanise an entire publication that has defined my lifetime. It gives context and light to the darkest of places and leaves you feeling slightly dirty. It makes the audience complicit in shaping what the Sun became and leaves you with a better understanding of both the paper and the country we live in.

Rising fear … Indira Varma and Harold Pinter in One for the Road at the Gate, Dublin, in 2001. Photograph: Tristram Kenton for the Guardian

JT Rogers

I have been haunted by Harold Pinter’s One for the Road since I saw it in 2001. This brief work shows us Nicolas, functionary for an unnamed totalitarian state, interrogating a husband, wife and child. When I sat down to watch it, I didn’t know the play. Twenty minutes later, when the lights came up, I couldn’t get out of my seat.

Pinter himself played Nicolas and his natural menace and charm as an actor made the arbitrary wielding of power that much more terrifying. But it’s his writing that makes the work devastating, and the play pulls you into the spider’s web of state-sponsored political terror. The story is elliptical; the charges against the young family are never spelled out. But as Nicolas sips his booze and pauses his Pinter Pauses, a fear rises in you. One for the Road viscerally conveys what it’s like to be powerless before the state. It pins you with the knowledge that you too would not be heroic if faced with the arbitrary, all-powerful cruelty of a government that wished to bend you to its will. No, you too would be crushed.

I’m full of admiration for the painful gut punch of an ending. The tortured man asks after his son and Nicolas’s casual response is totalitarian might, and every parent’s nightmare, distilled into one line – the political and the personal devastatingly twined.

The 2009 Arcola production of It Felt Empty When the Heart Went at First But It Is Alright Now. Photograph: Sheila Burnett

Ella Carmen Greenhill

A political play has to leave you wanting to change the world. It can’t just be a night out. Lucy Kirkwood’s It Felt Empty When the Heart Went at First But It Is Alright Now is a powerful exploration of sex trafficking. Yet it never feels like issue-based theatre. We meet Dijana, an eastern European woman in her early 20s, who is kept in an east London flat by her boyfriend turned pimp, Babac. He has told her she must work off a £20,000 debt. Her last client is about to come in. Once the debt is cleared, she’ll see her little girl in Brighton and they’ll have chips and swim in the sea together. But you gradually realise she has a skewed idea of her own reality.

Kirkwood shows us how Dijana is failed by her cousin, who essentially sells her to Babac. Then she is failed by Babac. Then again by the government and the criminal justice system, when she ends up in a detention centre. What comes across is that we don’t quite know what to do with people in her situation.

The play was developed with the company Clean Break, which promotes the rehabilitation of women affected by the system. Wh